POLITICO interview: Gov. Jack Markell

When Delaware Gov. Jack Markell took office nine months ago—on the same day that Barack Obama was sworn in as president—he inherited a roughly $800 million budget shortfall. The Democratic former state treasurer was forced to make painful cuts, and he has been traveling the state asking Delawareans for their ideas about how to return the state to solid financial footing.

Markell, who was previously an executive with Nextel, sat down with POLITICO during a recent visit to Washington to discuss the difficult national political climate for governors, a key House and Senate race in his state, and what he has accomplished during his first months in office. He began by talking about the advances his state has made on energy efficiency initiatives.

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Q: What brought you to Washington this week?

A: The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy did a study, and Delaware jumped more spots than any other state in the last year [in terms of energy efficiency] because of legislation we introduced and signed. For me, it’s all about jobs. As governor, I’m spending my time focused in three areas: creating jobs, reducing the expense of government and schools. To me, energy efficiency is great but it’s really about a bigger initiative, which is economic development.

Q: You’ve been traveling your state holding town hall meetings. What have you been hearing from your constituents?

A: Well, I’ve been doing it since basically my first week in office. They’re very helpful really for two reasons. One, it’s a great opportunity to hear what’s on people’s minds. And secondly it’s a good opportunity for me to talk to folks about where I see the state going. And actually I conclude them by asking for help in a couple of different areas. One has to do with this idea of reducing the expense of government. We’re spending an awful lot of time looking within our agencies and across agencies for cost-saving opportunities. But I’m a big believer that government does not have a monopoly on good ideas. So, what I say to the people who come to these town halls, is ‘you all interact with government, you probably have a perspective on places where we can save money. We want to hear about it.’

With respect to creating jobs, we want to get rid of as much of the red tape as possible. We want people to help us identify where that red tape exists. To some extent this is a sales game and the best opportunity we have is to leverage the resources of our economic development office. And I say to people, ‘you may know somebody in Delaware who wants to grow but needs a little help, you may know somebody in Delaware who’s got a business and is unhappy here. We want to know about it. We want to fix it. You may know somebody in another state who’s unhappy who might want to be here. We want to know about that too.’ So, for me the town hall meetings are really an opportunity to engage in two-way dialogue with people, and they’ve been very helpful.

Q: Were you worried that your meetings would end up like the raucous August town halls on health care?

A: They’ve been very respectful. Obviously there was some anxiety about that on the part of my staff, especially, but my view of the world is you’ve got to get out there. This is what you sign up to do and I find that when I’m in front of real Delawareans—we don’t ask them to submit their questions in advance. They raise their hands, they ask a question and they get an answer.

Q: Have any good ideas come out of the meetings?

A: We’ve received thousands of ideas. We created a Web site—Ideas.Delaware.gov http://www.ideas.delaware.gov/ —where we have people go and submit ideas about cost savings and the like. Some of them got into the last budget, some of them will get into our next budget proposals, some of them we cannot implement. But we think everybody ought to have a voice, and we’re trying to give them a vehicle for it.